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FreeBSD
Raised as a usability problem by 115 people on Hacker News over 19 years (2008–2026), in 96 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
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Every issue, all time, most people first
Too many half-deprecated jail tools, hard to give each jail an interfaceUnreviewed
20082026- Setting up a networked jail needs many non-trivial steps where things easily go wrong2025-09-16
- No one-command way to install a preconfigured service jail, requiring manual setup2023-08-15
- Couldn't figure out how to get jails working, so gave up2022-11-08
Ports often fail to compile, discovered only after hours of buildingUnreviewed
20082026- Ports builds fail with arcane errors, wasting time installing software like vim2023-10-16
- Cross-compiling ports for ARM is very hard; compiling on the Pi takes hours2016-01-03
- Ports often fail to compile, discovered only after hours of building2014-11-15
Upgrades need manual intervention several times during the processUnreviewed
20082026- Upgrading takes much more work, needing manual intervention several times during the process2024-10-01
- Upgrading requires a long manual sequence of commands and reboots2023-08-15
- Every few months upgrades break, forcing uninstalls or leaving no resolution path2021-06-06
Building packages takes hours, mostly in repeated configure scriptsUnreviewed
20082026- Building packages takes hours, mostly spent in repeated configure scripts2025-03-16
- Constant tweaking, too many windows and broken packages slow down getting work done2021-03-17
- Spent hours waiting for packages to compile from source2017-02-09
Suspend and resume quirks make it unusable on most hardwareUnreviewed
20082026- Suspend/resume has quirks or bugs on most hardware, making it unusable2025-01-14
- Laptop suspend/resume often fails, and finding the culprit driver means disabling drivers one by one2024-10-12
- Suspend/resume corrupts the desktop, forcing lots of configuration time2021-03-17
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Handbook has outdated chapters and too many ways of doing things2026-10-29
- Working out how much disk is cached requires manually summing tmpfs and ramfs mounts2026-07-04
- Can't tell how far along updates are or if they've stalled2026-03-18
- Nvidia drivers and Wayland need many manual parameters and workarounds to set up2025-12-20
- Managing daemons by hand requires writing shell scripts and separate log rotation setup2025-12-08
- Poorly documented, and the new init/config system is harder to use than before2025-12-01
- Realtek network card not detected, forcing phone tethering to install the driver2025-12-01
- Custom build options pull in dependencies and the build fails to compile2025-11-30
- Setting up a NAS on FreeBSD or Linux needs many confusing decisions and manual configuration2025-11-28
- Wiki and handbook lack current steps for configuring two-finger scrolling2025-11-25
- Hard to find quick how-to answers online; man pages and handbook are hard to navigate2025-11-25
- Multi-monitor docking station support too complicated to get working2025-11-13
- Getting past 1024x768 resolution in a VM takes major hoops2025-11-12
- Requires more tinkering than Linux and graphical UI feels less smooth2025-11-12
- Virtualization is bare and Docker needs a Linux VM that is troublesome to install2025-11-03
- Takes days to get graphics and a basic desktop working properly2025-10-22
- Gets lost in the menus and things don't work correctly afterward2025-10-22
- Setting up a networked jail needs many non-trivial steps where things easily go wrong2025-09-16
- Kernel panics while booting the install media on home server hardware2025-04-01
- Link is broken when clicked or copied, but works when typed manually2025-03-31
- Default install forces browsing the handbook for simple tasks; config files hard to locate2025-03-31
- Building packages takes hours, mostly spent in repeated configure scripts2025-03-16
- Suspend/resume has quirks or bugs on most hardware, making it unusable2025-01-14
- NFS on FreeBSD 13 is far slower than Linux, making it unworkable2024-12-10
- Text is crammed into a tiny box with its own small scrollbar2024-10-12
- Laptop suspend/resume often fails, and finding the culprit driver means disabling drivers one by one2024-10-12
- System won't boot after upgrade from 13 to 14 and can't recover from the failsafe2024-10-04
- Upgrading takes much more work, needing manual intervention several times during the process2024-10-01
- Many open-source projects assume Linux, so building software on FreeBSD is very hard2024-10-01
- Upgrading from 13.0 to 14.0 is very slow, consuming excessive disk I/O2024-08-27
- Found it very difficult to get FreeBSD up and running well2024-04-17
- Must manually check zpool health; a degraded disk went unnoticed for 30 days2023-11-30
- Desktop experience has things that don't work well and needs lots of configuration2023-11-10
- Ports builds fail with arcane errors, wasting time installing software like vim2023-10-16
- Getting just one directory from the large repo is awkward and tedious to do2023-08-29
- Needed manual hunting and tweaking to get mouse gestures and media keys working2023-08-25
- No one-command way to install a preconfigured service jail, requiring manual setup2023-08-15
- Upgrading requires a long manual sequence of commands and reboots2023-08-15
- Spent about 4 hours failing to set up a fully featured service with start, stop, restart2023-07-19
- Disk I/O was super-slow out of the box compared to Linux2023-07-06
- No clear way to configure XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and per-user session services2023-04-11
- Getting X11 and the laptop working took a whole weekend of fiddling2023-04-11
- Interface looks too small, leaving too little usable screen space2023-03-02
- Found FreeBSD hard work to use, per the author's own experience2023-02-21
- Backspace needs manual config; X setup requires repeated trial-and-error file editing2023-01-23
- Getting FreeBSD running on the Pi requires jumping through hoops2022-12-06
- Couldn't figure out how to get jails working, so gave up2022-11-08
- Handbook promises to explain firewall differences but doesn't, forcing guesswork2022-11-07
- Setup needs many hoops and leaves new users unsure their configuration is correct2022-10-29
- Most Linux software won't run on FreeBSD and instructions or community help are hard to find2022-08-07